The Island of the Dolls (Isla de las Munecas) sits in the canals south of Mexico City and is the current home of hundreds of terrifying, mutilated dolls. Their severed limbs, decapitated heads, and blank eyes adorn trees, fences and nearly every available surface. The dolls appear menacing even in the bright light of midday, but in the dark they are particularly haunting.

Not surprisingly, the island’s origins lie in tragedy. The story goes that the island’s only inhabitant, Don Julian Santana, found the body of a drowned child in the canal some 50 years ago. He was haunted by her death, so when he saw a doll floating by in the canal soon after, he hung it in a tree to please the girl. He hoped to both appease her tortured soul and protect the island from further evil. The story took a particularly sinister turn in 2001 when Don Julian drowned in the canal just like the little girl.

Getting to the island is a long and difficult task, but walking among the creepy dolls is an experience like no other. Most, if not all, of these dolls were rejected by their previous owners for various reasons. Severed limbs and body-less heads hang side-by-side with whole, sun-bleached dolls. Mold covers some, while others are missing nearly all of their artificial hair. Spiders and insects have taken up residence in the hollow parts of most of the dolls.

Bringing out the big ones here on the creepiness scale. I originally saw the highly disturbing educational short “The Child Molester” as a bonus feature when I purchased the DVD of “Hell’s Highway”, a documentary on highway safety films (ie; Red Pavement, etc… we will leave those for another post). This particular educational film was geared towards a very young audience, much too young for the subject matter. This film does contain GRAPHIC CONTENT at the very end (aprx 18m into it).

However, the reason I chose this short was the simple fact that even without the ending it would still be completely traumatizing to an 8 year old. It has every aspect of creepy. You’ve got your creepy melody and matching title screen right from the start, your typical mondo-era narrator pushing you along throughout the plot and all while playing through a 1960s film reel that looks like it’s been melting in a dungeon for 30 years. I understand wanting to warn children about talking to strangers, but this took it a bit far.